Karen Pechilis et al. ed., "Devotional Visualities: Seeing Bhakti in Indic Material Cultures" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
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Whatever you love, find it on eBay. eBay. Things people love. Welcome to the New Books Network. Welcome back to the New Books and Indian Religions podcast, a podcast channel here on the New Books Network. I'm your host, Dr. Raj Balker. And more importantly, I have the double delight today of welcoming to the podcast, Drs. Karen Fichelis and Amy Ruth Holt.

Both editors of Devotional Visualities: Seeing Bhakti in Indic Material Cultures. This is part of the Bloomsbury Studies in Material Religion series. Welcome both to the podcast. Thank you. With a captivating and maybe even sensational title such as Devotional Visualities. And for those of you who've seen the cover of the book, certainly there's a gripping image

there on, there must be a backstory to this book. How did this, where did this idea come from? It started, the collaboration really started in 2013. I met Karen at the conference on the study of religions in India at Drew University that she organized. And then from there, I

She created an edited journal issue of the Journal of Hindu Studies with Corinne Dempsey on the not quite divine. And I contributed an article in that issue. And then she asked me to be on her podcast.

American Academy of Religion panel in 2016 called Interpreting South Asian Arts New Directions. And I kind of left that panel feeling like we could have done more. And so as I was thinking about it, I was thinking maybe we should reframe all of these

into something specifically on bhakti and the arts. And then I basically wrote her this really long email with this four-page proposal saying, I have this great idea, we should form it this way. And she happily went along with it.

And then accidentally we kind of met in India at a hotel in 2017 where I didn't even recognize her. It was kind of hilarious. She had to reintroduce herself to me. And

We then came up with another idea where in 2017 we actually gave a co-presentation on Bhakti and women's voices at Madison at the symposium organized for the regional Bhakti scholars network.

And then finally, a few years later, then we kind of organized this into an edited journal issue of the Journal of Hindu Studies, which we call Contemporary Images of Hindu Bhakti Identity and Visuality.

And then from there, we're like, you know, this is probably more than just five articles that other people are probably working on this. So we opened it up in 2019 as well into a full day symposium at Madison, also with the Regional Bhakti Scholars Network, which was called Bhakti Visualities. And that's where most of these papers then originated from. And

But then since these papers, we've actually continued the collaboration. And in 2020, we then did an American Academy of Religion panel online during COVID that was called Modern Medias and Counter-Narratives of Devotion, where we're now starting to kind of branch into this idea of more modern media themes and the mechanization of arts.

And in addition to this, Karen is also working on the Cultural History of Hinduism series with Bloomsbury as their general editor of six volumes.

And in the third volume, which she herself edits, I'm also contributing an article in that. And that volume is due to be out in April. Indeed. And I have it on good authority that we might be covering that volume in the not too distant future. Oh, good, good. So basically what you're saying is... Sorry, go on, Karen.

I was just going to say, in other words, a long history. This sort of reminds me, wow, it has been 10 years. And it's been a great 10 years. I was just about to quip that, so do you hatches overnight? Yeah, the backstory for a decade, over a decade long. So tell us a bit about, so I'm sure the vast majority of our listeners will be familiar with the term bhakti, which is...

sort of the religious, the pious idiom of devotionalism across South Asian cultures. So tell us about Bhakti studies. Is it a burgeoning field? You know, is it, and also maybe place this contribution within

within that setting? Sure. Bhakti is a very, very popular field, actually. It's very accessible. You'll find it taught in many places.

on its own as a topic, but also in kind of dialogue with other devotional traditions, since devotion is a category in many world religions. And so it lends itself to comparison as well as detailed study of a certain group or a certain region, a certain tradition, etc.

And so it's been fun to be in the group. And again, Amy had mentioned the Regional Bhakti Scholars Network. So really the regional study of bhakti has been very, very prominent. And it's not really surprising that this has been, it's been a very textual study. The good news in terms of bhakti is that we have so many voices here.

in the poetry that was recognized and celebrated and saved. And so we have that from really even kind of post-classical times to early modern. And then, you know, Bhakti is around today. It's performed. People are adding to corpuses, right? That's been a topic for Kabir and Mirabai in particular.

And so it's not surprising that it's been very textual. But when Amy and I were having this collaboration, you know, really, really early on in that 2016 AAR panel, we were looking at bhakti visuality and embodied experience. And so that, right, we started really going in that direction. Amy did provide an important impetus for that as an art historian in particular.

And so we realized that, you know, yeah, certainly, of course, people associated bhakti with visual culture, but it wasn't really framed as that kind of issue. And it wasn't framed as visualities, which I'd like to emphasize for us as a plural. It's not one thing. There's a plurality of bhakti people. There's a plurality of ways of seeing things.

And we really wanted to investigate that and really felt it hadn't been done.

previously and that it should be done. Fascinating. Just serendipitously, our last interview, my last interview was Nancy Martin actually on her work on Mirabai. And she's also a contributor to this volume. And so Bhakti is very much well and alive in the cities. Absolutely. It's captivating. The voices are captivating. No doubt about that. Absolutely. Absolutely. And also, I just love the

I love the approach of lived religion and material cultures and, you know, so often as scholars, what are we good at? We're good. We are good at deciphering texts, whether secondary source or primary source. And so it really is lovely to see this array of material culture being discussed. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about the material culture itself. What examples might we have in this book?

Oh, well, almost anything you can think of, right? There are examples that come from fieldwork interviews, ethnography, but there's also discussion on film and theater and images that come from personal collections. There's temple imagery, temple sculpture. There's imagery from temple archives and museums, as well as just Indian museums and Western museums.

And of course, there's even online imagery included in the book. And so we're really almost covering any type of material or visual culture you can think of. Was there, while you were putting together this volume, from your perspective as editors, was there anything that surprised you or stood out in your mind about this process or this collection?

- Well, the surprising thing to me often was that this idea that so many people now are using online sources and before I would actually be criticized like maybe 10 years ago, I was using too many online sources.

And why am I not, you know, reading like old texts and things? And now, and the other thing that I found interesting was the constant reference to reuse, that it's not just about what's happening now. It's about building upon things that happened in the past. And that happens in many of the traditions we talk about in the book. Then that's one of the things, that's an intervention of the book actually is because so much of

When visuality has been talked about, it's been talked about in the modern period. It's been talked about as the emerging nationalism in India. And so we really I don't think I was surprised by it, but it was important, I think, to consider materials that were.

earlier than modernity and not just kind of a view of nationalism. Important, though, those studies have really been. And we've really, you know, we've drawn on them. But that was, I think, an interesting feature of this study for me. And

I'll just add that another really interesting feature was that, you know, the premise has really been in a lot of the textual studies that, you know, Bhakti has a different vision, it has a different way of seeing things. And I thought it was so interesting that, you know, people were looking at material visual objects and were talking about that

also, but in a different way, right? How sort of visuality changes the way one sees things. And so I thought that was particularly interesting, too. Would you say any more about the category of visuality and its distinction and overlap with Bhakti? Okay, well, you know, the overall story for us and this book

is the ways in which material visualities construct, change, reimagine, and redirect devotion into traditions past and present. So we put the emphasis on material visual culture. We really wanted to investigate what people are doing with images that are associated with bhakti, including images of saints, gurus, and gods.

specifically what is being made visible by the images and by practices of looking. So, visuality kind of shows us or calls our attention to what's made visible and what are the practices of looking that make it visible. And so, you know, to see and affect visualities in the making,

um in various communities some of some communities that really are kind of known bhakti communities pushy marg is there in the book uh swami ryan and uh tradition is there on the book but then also some unexpected

people, feminists, businessmen. I'm a very contemporary guru in the U.S. And so we found that it really expanded our field of looking at bhakti

Looking again at bhakti, that's what we call our intro, and that's part of the re-look at bhakti, is the involvement of a lot of different people there. So it is material culture and it is also visual culture. And would you say that this visual culture is necessarily implicated in or bound by darshana, the process of darshana, or not necessarily?

That's the elephant in the room, right? Oh gosh, I'm blanking on the name. But it's been said that this concept of darshan is really kind of like a stand-in for Hinduism and it's a stand-in for India in some ways. And so it's larger than life. And we do take up that issue. I mean, there are many of the

contributors who really do take up Darshan. I mean, Amy, you are definitely one of them who does that. And so we'll turn to you in just a second. I'd like to hear your reflections. But yeah, we did talk about, you know, the second section of our intro. Darshan is an established way of seeing. And so, you know, I won't rehearse the whole thing, but we did talk about

In the temple setting, darshan is being very hierarchical. And also that, if you're doing darshan as the emperor showing himself, it's that kind of hierarchy as well. We talked about other models of darshan, such as the roadside shrines. There's a lot of interesting work being done on that. It's sort of a democratization, right? They're putting temple images in new contexts, right?

And that's really what Bhakti is doing in a lot of ways is putting, yes, new images are created. Jeremy Sol's article is really good on that. Businessmen creating a new image of Hanuman, but also kind of using images in a different way. And so it is this participatory impulse, this I am involved, this interested,

perspective that Bhakti provides that people really engage to do this work. I'm James McComb reporting live from home in my bathrobe and slippers. Tonight, we're talking Dunkin' Polar Peppermint Coffee. Jean's here with the latest. Jean, do you copy?

The Home with Duncan is where you want to be. Well, I was just going to say that because darshan exists in Indian cultures, there's always this kind of emphasis on things that are visual. And in terms of the use of the term visualities,

I think that's an important bridge between our various disciplines of art history and religion scholar here is that it brings together then visual culture, visual studies and material culture where material culture happens to be more where religion scholars go while visual studies is where the art historian goes. So to bridge the two, we're now calling it visualities.

Speaking of that bridging, you know, between art history and religious studies, you know, what subfields or what interests, you know, what sorts of folks might be interested in this work? Subfields as in like what's covered in the book or the individual chapters? Perhaps in terms of audiences and interests and disciplines, you know, where might this be of value to folks who might be listening?

Okay, so the types of benefit you might get from the book or people who should be thinking about the book.

would be like a diversity of scholars that are scholarship and scholars that are covered in the book, which then, of course, are historians and religion scholars. But also, I kind of see the volume, since it is an edited volume, that an individual likely kind of pick it up looking for an individual article, maybe by someone they know or on a subject they're interested in. And then after reading that, they'll think,

well, this is kind of interesting how they've put it together with these other articles from different regions and times. And then they might like go and start at the very beginning of the book and read the introduction and the rest of the book cover to cover essentially to learn more about how devotion, it goes through like a lot of different cultures and religions altogether. So, yeah.

Once again, it's another like bridging subject. - And I think that given the diversity of materials looked at, right? So if people are interested in, again, what we're talking about in terms of this volume is visualities in the making and which are distinctive from established visualities, although they have relationships to that.

So anyone who's interested in the changing nature of the temple and temple imagery, anyone who's interested in studies of film and TV media, anyone who's interested in ethnography, anyone who's interested in performance theory,

And then also art from some personal collections that may not be widely circulating can also be found in this book. So I think there's a lot for scholars, but I think there's also for people who are just really kind of interested in the visual, interested in hearing about art.

what people are doing in India and the fact that it is across traditions and it is across experts and ordinary folk in this book. And so I think there is

a lot, something for everyone in a sense. And I would also say anyone who is attracted by the cover, sometimes you can judge a book, its cover. When it's an interesting cover like this by Siona Benjamin.

Well, first of all, excellent. It is a far reaching book, so I'm glad you fleshed that out. And you just put into my next question, which was, tell us about the cover. Where is this image from? And certainly folks who just click the link on the podcast notes and you'll see on the Bloomsbury site, it's a captivating cover whereby you can judge the book.

So tell us about the image. Yes, anyone who's attracted to it will join in. I'll just mention, and then before we turn to Amy to talk a little bit about the imagery itself, that it is by a contemporary artist, Sienna Benjamin, who's based in New Jersey, but a very, very successful artist who herself grew up in India in a Jewish community.

And she has really made multiculturalism and multiple, her own multiple identities. She has really made her art speak to those themes in a larger, in a larger way, although they're very firmly based in her autobiography. And so if we actually look at the cover, yeah,

It's kind of a weird thing to do on a podcast, I know, but we'll imagine it if you don't have it in front of you. The image shows then this woman who's colored blue and wearing...

a shawl or a scarf over her head, and then her hands are held together in what is generally associated to be prayer or Anjali Mudra. And then behind her, there is this cartoon-like explosion that says, Blam! And coming from a bubble over her head on the right, we see the words, You must save us from their wrath.

And so there's the actual image is called "Finding Home Fereshteh No. 75 Lilith" and Fereshteh means angel. And so it's meant to be basically a reflection upon the artist's identity as being multicultural. And then it's part of a series and that's why it's called 75.

And then the painting itself was called Lilith. And the title was actually originally on the bottom of the image, but on the book cover, it was cut off due to the just the centering of the print. And the writing was done in English, but in a script that looked like kind of the calligraphy of Urdu.

And of course, by calling it Lilith, it ties then to the Jewish tradition where we basically now have to reclaim Lilith as, with some context, she's an evil figure, but here she's obviously has more of a feminine beauty quality associated with her. So we're reclaiming her in this context. And then all the scarf,

Or the shawl over her head also has a number of multicultural religious associations that we can think about, depending on where you come from and what you're interested in. And so when I look at the shawl or scarf, I see it almost as a sari. It seems to have these paisley prints to it, and it's pink.

And so you can think of a woman in India maybe pulling the sari over her head. But it also has these blue lines on the side that is a reference likely to the Jewish prayer shawl. And we also, of course, the way she's postured, it also kind of looks like the Virgin Mother Mary, who also is typically sometimes covering her head. And it also, of course, could be related to in Islam, the hijab of covering the head.

And then there is the question of why she is blue, because blue, of course, also relates to the coloring of Krishna and Indian painting. But the artist herself says that as a woman of color living in America, that she identifies with this as well.

And then the explosion, of course, is a quote of a Lichtenstein painting, a Western painting, where he did a series of paintings called Blam. A lot of them are just explosions, but some of them are also exploding airplanes, and

But this is also could be thought of in relation to Indian comic books of the Amar Chitra Katha series, which the artist also was familiar with and is incorporating into her work.

And then there's this whole question then, of course, of what does the quote mean and what does it imply? So you and us and there, these are just open concepts that could be anybody. And so we're left with this question is, is she the subject or is she the object of what's going on here? And so is she praying to a deity who is outside who is going to help her or

Or is she maybe talking about herself in the second person thinking I'm going to save everyone. And maybe the explosion is generated from herself like a goddess.

Or maybe she's the devotee. And then, of course, then she is she's praying to another person or the action could also be the destruction of, you know, of the world or war behind her that she's now asking for help with. And so the it could have many connotations. And there's a lot of reading individually that you can do into this work of art.

And so it really kind of speaks then to our book in terms of the pluralism of devotion, because she is basically a devotee looking figure with her hands together in what's generally referred to as prayer. And then it also has all of these other ideas that come out of it with the mirroring and the materializing of memory and the question of look and the gaze and who's doing it. It really, for me, illustrated our...

our use of Indic in the volume as being multicultural, being traditions have entangled with each other and devotion is a great place to look for that because it tends to happen there because of the participatory involvement of ordinary people. And the late great Selvaraj talked about that quite a lot in terms of what

what religious authorities were doing and then what ordinary people were doing. And it was a very different portrait. And there was a lot of interchange on the ordinary level that maybe was not supposed to happen on the official authoritative level. And so I will also just quip that the cover of the book could also be something of a talisman for the editors. LAUGHTER

Clearly a straightforward, banal image. And we've just evidenced that a picture does save at least a thousand words. So you mentioned, you actually again preempted my next question and what you just said, which is, seeing bhakti in Indic material cultures, tell us about the word indik.

indic your use of indic and maybe if if you would be uh so so courageous maybe comment on uh the the adoption of the word indic and and the trend in scholarship the present yeah well i mean we we did want to use that term as um you know to suggest that there's a conversation

and different religions and different traditions in India. And so I just lost my second thought about that. Okay.

Well, I think the term comes about as a result of an alternative way to describe South Asia, where you can also include pre-partition India. And so it's common in studies of Islamic art to use the term Indic. And with the inclusion of Murad Raza,

Mumtaj's article in the volume, we wanted to suggest that not only is it about India or pre-partition India, it's also about things that are not just...

geographically oriented because you can also think of India as the diaspora as well. Like it's global now. Yeah. And that, yeah, that is definitely part of why we're using Indic. It is to suggest that there's a conversation among different traditions in India and beyond. And one of the interventions of this book is really that we're not sequestering

religious traditions at all. There's been a number of studies, even studies of bhakti, that really are trying to say, you know, look, there's a lot of sharing between Hindus and Muslims. And we wanted to kind of avoid saying there are these two groups and they're sharing. Instead, we wanted to put forward Indic devotion.

and then see who was speaking to that category. And again, it is different traditions. There's a multiplicity of traditions that I guess people would associate with Hinduism, but they're still different traditions. Indeed. I mean, that move, that turn resonates insofar as when I inherited this podcast,

It was called Hindu Studies. And really, I wanted to create space for all things Indic. This is how I think of it. And perhaps had the word been more in vogue, then I might have even called it, I may have even pitched it as Indic religions rather than Indian religions. But people get the sense that I mentioned a few times on the podcast that, I mean, Indian, obviously not in terms of the modern nation state, but Indian in terms of civilizational India,

comparable to Persian versus Iranian or Egyptian, you know, modern versus ancient. And that's actually... Sorry. I was just going to jump in, but that's actually...

Murad Mamtoz, Khan Mamtoz, excuse me, intervention is he's really looking at Persian sources in his article. And so, right, that is part of the heritage. It is part of the history. And so, you know, just to build on a point that you're making. Yeah. And there is clearly there are various what we think of as religious traditions, which, you know,

which occur across the subcontinent. And yet there is something of an Indic ecosystem where phenomena will transcend what we think of as religious lanes proper. So it certainly resonates. That's it. That's it. Yeah, that's what we're really riffing on. And yeah, I mean, it's worth also pointing out in this connection that we do have

examples in the book from all over India, the South, the North, the East, the West. And so that's part of it too. So it's part of what's behind Indic. Fascinating. So is there anything else about the volume that you'd like to say you think we should touch on?

I think we should talk about the structure of the book. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was, you know, we clearly we had, you know, we kind of came away from the symposium and we, many of the authors in the book did participate in that 2019 symposium at Madison sponsored by Regional Bhakti Scholars Network.

And I will say that our VSN has really kind of tried to push the boundaries on what bhakti is too. And so we were in the group that was trying to do that. And so we realized we had a lot of very interesting examples, etc. But...

we really needed to kind of find a commonality. And so taking a look at, right, once we had all of these articles in our hand, instead of just hearing them on the fly at the symposium,

We noted that all of the images that contributors were considering were prominently associated with bhakti. Okay, that doesn't mean that all the interpretations of the visualities, the practices of looking were bhakti, but it means that images of bhakti were very generative in that context. And so

One of the themes that emerged was that we had essays showing the crafting of God images in the context of pilgrimage, home shrines, and even success in business. We also had articles that showed the representation of saints in painting, film, and drama.

in ways that make them speak to a variety of people from specific communities to a mass audience. We also had articles that showed the vitality of the guru in images from sculptural to digital, as well as in everyday objects. And so, but if, but however, right, if we'd taken this route, our section categories in the book would have looked very familiar: God, saint, and guru.

But what the chapters were actually telling us was that the material visualities were not confined to bhakti. Various visual strategies revealed aspects of human agency and reception that make visible, circulate, and shape human concerns more widely construed. So we, from that, we were shifting towards practices of looking.

that makes visible ways in which people from early modern times to the present day tell distinctive stories with images that engage the participatory impulse and joined by Indic devotion. So this yields complex relationships between images and devotion and visualities. And so we then...

Instead, structure the book by these practices of looking, ways of seeing, visualities, including

sorry, materializing memory, mirroring and immaterializing portraits and shaping the return look. And so another way we thought about structuring the book before we came up with these great themes was, and how we actually proposed it to the publisher originally, was that we were going to divide it by medium almost with this very kind of art historical way of thinking about it, where we would have one category would be objects that are art

but more like material culture. And then we would have another category on portraits because a lot of the papers we got there are five, I think, chapters in the book that are dedicated to portraits. So we knew right away the portraits had to be a theme in the book. And then the third idea we had was maybe formats, which is very kind of unclear thing, but as a different type of medium or reoccurring way of structuring materials.

And but that also proved as being not very effective because it's probably too art historical and because it focuses more on the art and not the process of bhakti, which, of course, was how we wanted to frame the book as being more about how bhakti was shaping and forming these ideas of how the art should look and be used.

And the more of the human aspect of it being brought in of how it's often the devotees that we learn about through these images more so than the actual object itself or what its subject is and and

And so that made these three sections of the book very telling. And I think even the sections of the book can be brought to reflect the cover as well, is that if you really think about it, the materializing of memory comes about through the various symbols of her gesture and shawl. And

But then also if you think about the idea of mirroring with often the gesturing of devotion towards the divine is a reflection of the divine itself is the idea again of mirroring and immaterializing portraits. And then of course the idea of shaping the return look, which is whether or not she is the subject or is she the actor of the image.

Yeah, and we've had a lot of ideas on these categories. And so, you know, I'll provide sort of a little bit of a snapshot of what they really kind of resonate with for me. And so I think of materializing memory as kind of challenging religion studies kind of focus on sacralization of material objects

So the objects are imbued with an aura of extraordinary power. In this case, we're studying the ways in which that which is dear to people in memory becomes materialized in a generative matter. So it's in a sense, it's kind of the other way around. So I would point to kind of memories of pilgrimage and Richard Davis's article, memories of loved ones,

in Ashley Andrews, memories of the heritage of Native place, a couple with success in business in Jeremy Saul's article, and then memories of the guru, guru's presence and activities in everyday objects. And then that really kind of makes, you know,

The terms of a museum display are a little bit different, that those objects are charged. Mirroring and immaterializing portraits, keeping in mind that a mirror is not a literal reflection. The theme here would be seeing oneself in the picture, and this certainly seeing the Indo-Muslim devotional community in Kamal, in Murad Khanwumtaz's article.

Push Timar devotees, Manaratha images in which they actually put themselves with, you know, showing homage to the Chitraji. Jack Hawley's article on the intervisuality of images of Sirdas from early modern to the internet. And then there's another kind of

look at portraits as immaterializing. And this is interesting because portraits are known for their specificity. But in these studies, they can create a visuality of shared presence. And I would certainly view Amy's look at contemporary guru Nityananda's self-portrait as really showing us a shared divinity, equally possessed by devotees,

And I would look at Ankur Desai's article on Saha Jananda that engaged double references, humanity and divine, worldly sovereignty, cosmic sovereignty. So he is really pointing to a coalescence of historical existence and divine possibility. Lastly, shaping the return look. Generally speaking, the gaze is a claim to subjectivity. In the case of women, there's a further tension.

since the male gaze possesses cultural normativity. And so we were looking at how the female gaze is performed through the figures of female bhakti saints.

And so I was looking at this gaze from the female saint as being represented as critical on society, calling attention to violence against women and urging its eradication. Again, that's not a bhakti message. It's a larger social message, but it's anchored in a bhakti image. And then in Heidi Paul's article is an evolution from a private devotional gaze of Meera,

which is glimpsed by a public, and this gets kind of transformed to her gaze as maternalistic and accommodating a conservative, consumerist public. And how we get from one to the other is the story in her article. So in all these ways, right, these visualities are engaging, and we maintain that they change the way you see things. Yeah, certainly. Okay.

Oh, sorry. And I really think we should thank all of our great contributors here writing for this book because each individual article is worthy of reading in itself. And in addition to reading the entirety of the volume and how we structure it, the writers involved really did a great job.

It's certainly a rich array of papers and invitations to visualize and to envision and re-envision visualities themselves and really lots of thought-provoking stuff. Thank you very much both for appearing on the podcast today. Thank you. It's been delightful.

Likewise. For those listening, we've been speaking with Dr. Karen Petulis and A. Ruth Holt, editors of Devotional Visuality, Seeing Bhakti in Indic Material Cultures. Until next time, keep well, keep listening, keep reading, and pay attention to what you're looking at and what it means. Bye for now.